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Crisis In The Church

Published on Nov 20, 2015

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PRESENTATION OUTLINE

CRISIS IN THE CHURCH

CHURCH REFORM

The want for reformation encouraged a lot of church leaders who had wanted to change like the Greece and eastern Europe Orthodox churches. Ceremony was a huge role because the Orthodox Christians believed that they got divine grace by meeting and doing rituals together. The reformers wanted to standardize ritual practices so they reformed the Russian Orthodox ritual according to the most accurate religious texts and practices of Grece and eastern Europe Orthodox churches.

Patriarch Nikon

In the mid-17th century, the reform leader was the patriarch of Moscow (the spiritual leader of the Russian Orthodox Church), a monk called Nikon. He and his followers made schools that spoke Latin, Greek, and Church Slavonic (ritual language of the Russian Orthodox church). There were churches that were built in the Byzantine style.
The reformation required for Russian priests to make the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of two which was common with Orthodox priests of different lands. Conservatives took this change as a symbol that the church leadership had turned on its traditional ways. Nikon had a huge resistance even with the help of the tsar. A group of conservative monks with the aid of 90 cannons held against a tsarist reformation force in the fortified Solovestskii monastery for seven years.

Avvakum and Old Belief

Avvakum led the conservatives to refuse Nikon's new ways and to campaign the old ways. They feared that the reformed rituals wouldn't be accepted by God and they wouldn't receive the grace of God. They were afraid that this would threaten the enternal salvation promised to them so they blamed the serfdom on outsiders. The state tax collectors were agents of the Antichrist (cosmic enemy of God in the book of Revolution in the New Testament) and the tsar was all evil because he support Nikon and his followers.
The tsarist government outlawed Old Belief and exiled many followers of it to Siberia. Other followers were exticuted or tortured. Avvakum was killed at the stake by the tsar in 1681 and the tsar declared the Old Belief evil and you would be killed if you practiced it the year after he killed Avvakum. This didn't work and so the government reached a truce of sorts that if the Old Believers practiced their religion quietly or in far away places like Siberia they would be okay. Old Belief split into many different sections and never had a on true theology but it survived and attracted many conservative Russian merchants. Many of the important politicians, industrialists, and people of the arts were from Old Believer families.

Tsarist Control over the Church

The split of the a Russian Orthodox church weakened it and at the same time strengthened the tsar's control. The tsar was offered opportunities to take control over the church and during the 16th and 18th centuries, the increase in tsar control was so great that Peter the Great made the Russian Orthodox church into a department of religious affairs.
Church officials and political leaders cooperated a lot but wealth and power of the economy made the church go against the government. Large monasteries were a big rival because they had a lot of resources for example they were centers of learning, had a lot of political influence, and some had military fortifications (bases of operation against the government) so the government had good reasons to want to take the land from the church. Ivan III began the tsar's taking of church property.
During the reign of Peter the Great, he displaced the patriarch of Moscow and made a state council of people he specifically picked out that supervised church affairs with a military officer that ruled over the council. Peter picked out bishops for the Russian church and required the parish clergy to report and behavior deemed illegal or treaturious by the government. The Russian church had transformed into a state government department.